this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
159 points (98.2% liked)
196
19083 readers
263 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
Other rules
Behavior rules:
- No bigotry (transphobia, racism, etc…)
- No genocide denial
- No support for authoritarian behaviour (incl. Tankies)
- No namecalling
- Accounts from lemmygrad.ml, threads.net, or hexbear.net are held to higher standards
- Other things seen as cleary bad
Posting rules:
- No AI generated content (DALL-E etc…)
- No advertisements
- No gore / violence
- Mutual aid posts are not allowed
NSFW: NSFW content is permitted but it must be tagged and have content warnings. Anything that doesn't adhere to this will be removed. Content warnings should be added like: [penis], [explicit description of sex]. Non-sexualized breasts of any gender are not considered inappropriate and therefore do not need to be blurred/tagged.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our matrix channel or email.
Other 196's:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Triangle, "has 180 degrees," subtends 360 degrees.
Circle, "has 360 degrees," the sum of the interior angles is infinite.
(I'm not actually confused, it's just that "a circle has 360 degrees" and "a triangle has 180 degrees" is a little annoying in that they use different definitions.)
A circle has 360° discreet 1° angles. While there's a theoretically infinite number of angles within a circle, those angles would need to have an infinitesimally small fraction of a degree. If you divide a circle into 3600 angles, each angle would be 0.1°
A segment of a circle is also measured as an arc corresponding to a vertex facing outwards from the center. A triangle's vertices on the other hand face inwards. The sum of those angles is always 180°. If you juxtapose a circle on top of it, yes, it goes all the way around since it's a closed shape. But if you place the three vertices side by side so that their lines line up, it'll only cover half of the circle.
There's no inconsistency.
I don't think we're talking about the same thing.
If you take a circle to be the limit of a polygon as the number of sides goes to infinity, then you have infinite interior angles, with each angle approaching 180deg, as the edges become infinitely short and approach being parallel. The sum of the angles is infinite in this case.
If you reduce this to three sides instead of infinite, then you get a triangle with a sum of interior angles of 180deg which we know and love.
On the other hand, any closed shape (Euclidean, blah blah), from the inside, is 360deg basically by definition.
It's just a different meaning of angle.
See, for example, the internal angle sum, which is unbounded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_polygon